> Unfortunately, I'm too suspicious of Amazon (and Google, for that matter) For Christmas, my mom decided to get us both a Google Home and a Facebook Portal (w

> Unfortunately, I'm too suspicious of Amazon (and Google, for that matter) For Christmas, my mom decided to get us both a Google Home and a Facebook Portal (with Alexa built in). We already have an Echo Dot that lives on our fridge that my wife's parents gave us. Anyway, I thought it was a bit interesting that out of the "big three" evil data stealing tech monopolies, the Google Home was the only one that made me uneasy. I suppose it's a carry over from the whole Firefox / Chrome rivalry. I don't really care for the Echo Dot we already have, but it is admittedly quite useful for "Hey Alexa, play Christmas music" or "Hey Alexa, set a timer for 10 minutes." Also I have been legitimately impressed by the video quality and performance of the Facebook Portal because any time I've tried to use their video chat from my computer it's had roughly a 30 second lag and been completely unusable. The Portal is both a crisp picture and no noticeable lag. I guess the thing I should wonder most about that is why video chat from a traditional computer is so terrible. The only thing I've ever had work decently for video chat with family has been Skype.